Archive for the ‘Horde’ Category

It’s unfortunate that I don’t have a better picture from my recent Twin Peaks match. I went Holy and holy crap did I have a hell of a time.

I was credited with the third most honorable kills and was a healing beast.I don’t have great gear or skill but for whatever reason I keeping folks ticking throughout the fight. It got to the point where I was the primary target of the Horde. They’d blitz past the DPS and tank to try and kill me. At one point I had over half their team (six total) beating on me in a corner of our base. I didn’t really care since that was six less trying to win the match. I held out for over a minute there before dying. My conclusion? We were up against sucky Horde players. It was as if they died if we so much as sneezed on them. My holy shock was taking sizeable chunks off of their health bars, which was nice. It’s not going to happen very often, but it was nice to see – even just this once.

This is a bloody post of death and murder. Well, attempted murder anyways. As you can see above, I returned to Tol Barad, but it was an ill-fated venture. We lost, I died, and it wasn’t allot of fun. I did get one good thing out of it, though.

Hey now, you’re an All-Star, go… slay.. ahem (I hate that song, btw). Yeah, so I got that achievement. It was only a notch on my belt of death this day.

Here I am, dead in Stranglethorn Vale of all places. I almost don’t want to tell anyone how I died here, but here it goes. I was doing archeology and flying around STV. There were three in the STV zones and after doing the northern two I flew to Gurubashi Arena for the third one. Can you see it? Me, flying into the arena and getting PvP’d to death? Well, that’s not what happened. What did happen was I was flying in above the trees and got to where I wanted to start – and promptly dismounted. Yes, I dismounted for whatever reason, some 100+ feet in the air. I was so stunned at my stupidity that I forgot to bubble to survive. I was stared, dumbfounded. I have no idea what prompted me to dismount. I’m shamed by my stupidity.

Now I’m sitting, watching over my corpse in Ironforge. Yup, I died in two places I shouldn’t die. Here I tried to fend off a Tauren paladin trying to attack the Midsummer Festival fire. He was originally just healing a goblin hunter, but once I attacked (with a dwarven priest behind me two ran away after buffing me) and our back-and-forth took us from the Hall of Explorers through Tinker Town to the entrance to the Deep Run Tram, back to Hall of Explorers, and finally headed towards the Military District before I finally fell. I was working on a razors edge with my health most of the fight but the moo-cow wasn’t. Looking at Recount afterwards showed that he was much, much more efficient then me. Way more standard hits, more crusader strikes, and he took less damage overall. He was a retadin too, but a much better, way more geared one then I. Dammit.

I’m so sick of Arathi Basin. It and Eye of the Storm are my two least favorite PvP battlegrounds. I’d rather wind up in Isle of Conquest, which I also don’t really like these days. I recently hopped into an AB battle for the weekly battleground and had a poor match. I had the third most honorable kills for the Alliance (that modifier is important, more in a minute), but died four times and only got 2 killing blows in under 19 minutes. Whereas I had 16 HKs, over half of the Horde had 50+. The most killing blows on our side was 4, while three of the Horde had more then 10. Part of it is my lack of gear, but the big part is my dearth of skill. I’m not a raider so I use PvP as my aggressive outlet but the Horde on my battlegroup (not my server, so much, but the battlegroup as a whole) are really good. Either that or the Alliance on my battlegroup are really lousy. It’s frustrating.

I don’t do nearly this badly in Tol Barad, nor was Wintergrasp ever this hard. Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

I spent a good hour or so in Uldum this morning hunting for Elementium in Uldum. I came back with over 100 ore, enough for five of the hard stuff. I even came back with a bar of Pyrium and a few gems, which was a nice bonus. I spent another half hour or so working on my engineering skill (which is why I was hunting Elementium). It finally dawned on me that I had been hoarding money (only about 2k gold, but still) towards nothing so I decided to put a chunk of it towards power-leveling engineering. I made a Volatile Thunderstick, a Finely-Tuned Throat Needler and a handful of Heat-Treated Spinning Lures, upping my skill to 515. It cost me over a thousand gold but I wasn’t using it anyway.

After that, I noticed that a battle had broken out, so I lent my axe to the cause.

For Tol Barad! I joined shortly after the battle broke out this time so I was an active participant. Almost too active. At one point I fought an Orc death knight and a Troll hunter for over a minute before I finally fell. They must have taken notice because the Horde would swarm me in team battles over and over, but rarely killed me thanks to timely healing and fighting by me and some serious help from my allies.

I was swarmed over and over! It got frustrating, being no.1 target but since half of the time I lived (yes, only 50% of the time) I went with it. I helped kill quite a few Hordies, but got no honorable kills of my own. Dammit. I was too busy tanking them all to kill anyone, I guess. Thankfully it all turned out worth it.

Yes, we won. Yay! I like to think that my keeping the Horde busy was key to the win, but in reality it was more likely that I didn’t greatly impact the battle either way. In any case, I’ve won my first battle, and you know I’ll be back.

The other day I was in a very offensive Wintergrasp defense. In this battle, we – the Alliance – were on defense but spent the whole battle on the attack. We quickly dropped the towers and began to choke the Horde off at the workshops. As you can see here, we were assaulting the western workshop when the battle ended. It was fun, what with the Horde being constantly on the run from the masses of Alliance heroes. Death to the Horde!

Recently Gav dropped his Holy spec for a PvP Prot spec. The reasons are many, but chief among them are my dislike of healing’s stress and my desire to do better in Wintergrasp. However, it seems I may be wasting my time. Most of the time now, the Horde on my server hardly even contests Wintergrasp. Case in point: the other morning I took my new PvP Prot spec to Wintergrasp (after spending upwards of an hour leveling my one-handed axe skill) and was shocked to see everyone getting their butts kicked by a few random Horde. They had, it turned out, a Tenacity of more then 15. However, there seems to be very, very few of them. We estimated there were about six Horde total in Wintergrasp. With those paltry numbers they were easy enough to beat back, tenacity or no. It was to the point where I was recognizing the same Hordies over and over again. They were decimating our ranks early as we tried to go in small groups, but once we started hanging around in large numbers even a tenacity of x17 wasn’t that big a deal. They’d ride a vehicle up to the keep and 10-20 of us would decimate it. They actually got into the main courtyard while we were still disorganized early on, as you can see. Death to the Horde!

I had bought up some new Prot gear for Gav prior to the battle, including a Teldrassil Protector and Titan-Forged Bracers of Triumph. Since I’m not planning on using this spec for PvE, I’m stocking it up with Resilience. Hopefully this will keep my dumb butt alive longer.

Well, I won my first Isle of Conquest match today. Actually, that’s a lie. The Alliance won a match while I was there; I was no help. I got ganged up on by – no lie! – six hordies at once near the start, all of them after me alone. Later, there was an undead warlock at the top of one of our towers, burning the hell out of me while I tried to shoot his tanks with the turret. How inconsiderate. Couldn’t he see I was busy?! Anyway, I finally got un-busy (he killed the turret) and turned my attention to him. I swear he was cheating somehow. He had only slightly more HP then me, maybe a thousand or so, but he wasn’t taking any damage from my attacks. WTF?? I literally couldn’t hurt him. I’ve had the same problem was several different foes in IoC. Yesterday, a Draenei death knight and I chased a Tauren shaman all across the map, but we couldn’t kill him. We’d stun him, pin him, pound on him, and yet he’d take next to no damage. What. The. Hell?! He wasn’t using his totems because our battle took us all across the island, so how was he so damned immortal? *sigh*

Anyway, we won today, somehow, even though the Horde held most of the map. Don’t ask me how; I was in our keep, dead. I spent most of the match that way: rezzing in our keep’s graveyard. I did account for the second most Honorable Kills on the Alliance though, even though I had no killing blows. I guess that means that I was wearing everyone down but not finishing anybody. That’s no way to win.

Ok, my ambition to do a Path of the Paladin post has been overwritten – at least for now – by an infatuation with the Isle of Conquest battleground. It rocks. Period. It’s like a mini-Wintergrasp on steroids.

… ok, that may not have made allot of sense. What I meant was that it’s allot smaller and more concentrated then Wintergrasp, but the gameplay is amped up to an unbelievable degree. Flying battleships, rampant vehicles, multiple capture points that provide the factions with various bonuses… it’s great fun. I boarded the air ship on my second match (the first one lasted about four minutes due to a sudden server restart), and was watching people jump off. I watched, and saw that they got parachutes once they did, so I jumped too… and fell, and fell (“c’mon, a little help here?!” I was thinking), and finally *poof*, parachute time. I got an achievement for getting into the Horde’s courtyard without breaking down a gate, but we lost. In fact, I’ve not seen a victory yet. Seeing as how my server is more or less balanced in power in Wintergrasp – and maybe slightly tilted towards the Alliance – the other servers in my Battleground must have some kick-ass Horde. Either that or our Horde suck. One of the two.

It’s Midsummer Festival time, and I’m downtrodden. I loved this festival last year, but I’m just not getting up for it again this year for whatever reason. I – as Gav, of course – have however had a couple of interesting events occur in correlation with the occasion.

One quest, Unusual Activity, took me to Zoram Stand in Ashenvale, near Blackfathom Deeps. I’d never run the dungeon before, so I saw no reason not to run in and kill Aku’mai while I was there. No problems encountered, and I completed that particular Midsummer Festival mini-questline to boot.

I also hung around in Stormwind for about an hour last night, protecting our fire. I helped kill an Orc death knight, a Tauren warrior, and – most interestingly – a Blood Elf paladin. This paladin was being chased through the canals by a Dwarven hunter, but the hunter couldn’t finish him, mostly because of us pally’s legendary survivability. I joined in and chased him through the canals until he hit a dead end between the trade district and Old Town, where I cornered him and killed him. I got some congrats for my perseverance, and another human paladin and I grouped to hunt down hordies in the city. We found none, but it was good to make a sweep in case.

Am I being corrupted by PvP, or was this just an act of justice, with me doing my duty as part of the Alliance? I’m not sure. Maybe both.

Hi, I’m Alphasim . I’ve been playing World of WarCraft for four years now and my main is a level 85 human paladin named Gavelier. Gav features prominently here at Alazar so you'll get to know him and his guild.

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